Esperanto: Springboard to Speech Processing?

It has long been realized that Esperanto can serve as a springboard to learning foreign languages. To visit a website discussing this springboard concept, click here. A more focused use of Esperanto along the same lines is that of using it as a springboard to advancing the technology of speech processing. To view the Wikipedia article on Speech Processing, click here. A major barrier to the advance of the technology of speech processing is the immense amount of talker variability, as mentioned in the description of the book Talker Variability in Speech Processing:

* Explores talker variability, one of the central problems in automatic computer speech recognition * Provides broad views of the problem and various attempts to solve it Since the problem of talker variability is apparently so difficult, why not first solve the problem for Esperanto speech? The researchers would have less background noise - syntactic and aural - to contend with. At any rate, it seems safe to say that if they can't crack this nut for Esperanto, they certainly can't crack it for any other language, such as English or Russian. Therefore, a funding source for speech processing projects mightly reasonably and wisely say to the researchers: "First focus exclusively on solving the problem for Esperanto speech. When we have achieved that, we'll go on to the general case." (end of page) (return to Table of Contents)